The Australian Covid State not only crushed our freedom and rights. It confidently, and with massive public funding, built for the pandemic future it believed we all faced. The Spectator Australia’s Alexandra Marshall has drawn attention to the apparently now not needed infrastructure of the Covid State. She terms it the white elephant zoo.
The term “white elephant” has been explained thus, by History Extra:
Although a white elephant used to be considered a sacred and tremendously valuable animal in Siam, being given one as a present by the King could be the worst thing to happen to you.
Today, the term ‘white elephant’ denotes any burdensome, expensive and useless possession that is much more trouble than it is worth. The origins of the phrase come from Siam (modern-day Thailand).
https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/why-do-we-say-white-elephant/
Sacred in Siam, a heavy burden for the long-suffering taxpayers of our fair land. Back to Alexandra:
The Premiers might want to consider balancing their budgets by setting up a petting zoo for their endangered White Covid Elephants. Members of the public could come and visit the hundreds of millions of dollars they cost to purchase and upkeep and ask questions of the zoo keepers like, ‘Why the hell did we build quarantine camps for a seasonal flu that was almost over?’ and ‘Was it necessary to fit convict electronic ankle bracelets to people in quarantine?’
State governments, with the approval, indeed, with the funding, of the now shamed and mercifully departed Morrison Government, rushed to build quarantine facilities to house the infected. It was all part of the hilariously inept attempt to “keep us safe”. To eliminate the virus. To fight the Covid demon. Just like the useless face nappies, the distancing, the vaccines, the contact-trace, the mass testing, and the rest, all the various interventions have been shown to have been chimeric and ultimately worthless.
The Queensland version of the Covid camp was sold as a particular exemplar of Australian Covid safetyism. Here is Alexandra Marshall:
Queensland’s ‘Wellcamp’ (which sounds like an Orwell theme park) outside of Toowoomba was proudly opened in mid-February 2021 by Annastacia Palaszczuk. It was built to house those pesky unvaccinated international travellers, holding them in small prison cells. Why only unvaccinated travellers? Quarantine is predicated on the notion of locking diseases in with excessive force. It’s not a quarantine facility if half the infected travellers take an Uber straight into the centre of town. Nobody in the press challenged Palaszczuk on the distinction.
Deputy Premier Steven Miles made it quite clear that this was a holding cell for the unvaccinated, not a genuine quarantine station.
‘We anticipate an ongoing number of arrivals, particularly from countries where their vaccines aren’t recognised by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and therefore will be required to quarantine. As well as farmers, refugees from other countries who haven’t been able to access vaccinations.’
The corrupt regime of Daniel Andrews had its own white elephant.
The situation is nearly identical in Victoria, where Daniel Andrews has his own white elephant exhibit. Victoria’s $580 million quarantine facility in Mickleham is the most expensive of all the albino zoo animals. It was built by the federal government (why did you do that, Scott Morrison?) and operated by the Victorian Labor government.
As Marshall notes, the Victorian Minister Lisa Neville boasted that “you could see it from space”. Wow!
The Covid camps were marketed as part of the grand scheme. All part of the great Covid lies, and part of Covid theatre. Like “Covid zero”, like “we are all in this together”, like “granny killers”, like “the vaccines are effective”. They were vehicles for State Government Covid virtue signalling. In Andrews’ case, it accompanied his thug, politicised police force’s brutal crushing of rights, freedom and democracy. All well documented.
But, come 2022, the great rethink …
We don’t need to quarantine risky Covid types, after all. We have all “moved on”. Sadly, the voters seem to have moved on, egged on by a political class determined that we now “look over there”.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-wrong-doers-who-are-desperate-to-move-on-from-covid/
The borders are open. The masks are, mostly, off. The trains in New South Wales are mask free. We don’t need to isolate when if infected. We can cross interstate borders. We can leave the country. We can return to Australia, even if unjabbed (with apologies to Novak Djokovic). Now with the quiet “moving on” of the Covid camps, we are witnessing what amounts to a virtual jumbo sale of covid era policies. Everything has to go!
Now that the Covid pandemic has been recognised globally (by those with eyes to see) as a massive con job, by all but a few of the remaining, heavily invested Covid class, we are left with the detritus of the panic. But the overhang isn’t just about the lives lost or ruined. There is all the embarrassing infrastructure.
But isn’t this a familiar story? Haven’t we heard it before?
The other great globalist pysop strategy of the twenty-first century is the great climate con. It too has its white elephants. Think of the rapidly decommissioned desalination plants, worth billions of dollars and now useless, in the new age of La Nina. The dams will be empty, said Tim Flannery. Tim, mercifully, has retreated to publishing “greatest hits” collections of his writings and has ceased to prognosticate on future climatic trends. The NSW Government now wants to raise the wall at Warragamba Dam!
The dams, after all, won’t be empty. They will now be overflowing. I wish these climate gurus could make up them minds. Ice age predicted in 1970. Now catastrophic warming. Once droughts. Now floods.
But we still have those marvellous desalination plants. The Victorian one set the citizens of MelDanistan back nearly 6 billion dollars. Sydney’s cost nearly two billion. Perth has one, as does the Gold Coast.
There are lessons here, about big government, the false appeal of ideology, overreach, bureaucratic creep and taking our democratic eyes off the ball. When the media are sympatico with idiot progressivist ideologies, when the electorate is decidedly “low information”, when bureaucrats are no longer neutral and rational, we lose our political antennae and our capacity to shout “stop, this is madness”.
White elephants are nothing new. Every city that has ever hosted an Olympic Games will be familiar with the term. Public policy is littered with them. Some are mere vanity projects, like Sydney’s George Street white elephant, the light rail, one of a triumvirate of catastrophic decisions which together have ruined downtown Sydney (Covid lockdowns and lockout laws being the other two). How about knocking down a perfectly good footy stadium only to build another one just like the one they knocked down, on the same plot of land. Rare genius there, at the taxpayer’s expense.
The nicknames given to white elephants in Canberra – which has its own ludicrous light rail system – identify their progenitors. For example, there is Gar’s Mahal (the ghastly High Court building, named after Sir Garfield Barwick) and Gareth’s Gazebo (the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, named after Gareth Evans).
Others are driven by electoral politics. Like moving the Powerhouse Museum from inner Sydney to a flood-prone Parramatta site, only then to not move the old one but simply give parramatta its own. To have not one but two powerhouse Museums! The triumph of country independents and their holding of the balance of power brought with it a spate of state-of-the-art regional hospitals. Yes, country regions d need better health facilities, but to confine them to the seats of the loudest and electorally best placed MPs is a bit off.
Still others are created out of the impetus felt by politicians to announce things. To cut ribbons. Let us call it the “tyranny of the announcable”. The current NSW Government has largely done it through tunnels. Very lucrative for the companies which build, own and operate them. But helping to drive Sydney commuters broke, through prohibitive tolls, and to drive train commuters to turbo-charged anger for a range of reasons. Speaking of trains and white elephants, the new interurban trains have no been sitting idle for three years. White elephants which do not move.
So, we have vanity projects, announcables, ideological white elephants and the Olympics. In Victoria following the election of the Andrews Government, we even had one that was paid for but not built! Next we have the crooks.
White elephants are often created by crony capitalism, by endemic, corrupt relationships between government and business. They have been nailed well and truly by public choice theory.
Finally, we have innocent white elephants. Perhaps mistakes, perhaps they simply outlived their usefulness. Back in the day, white elephants, like nineteenth century heavy rail in rural areas, were built in good faith and absent ideology. According to many, they were innocent mistakes, but built in good faith in order to serve the interests of the people. (For some, of course, the mistake with heavy rail was giving up on it, a view with which I have considerable sympathy). Not now. Now we construct massive mistakes in the service of ideology.
And in these times, we have the added connections between government and corporate media. And with globalist supra-national organisations. And with big philanthropy. There is a network of self-serving connections across the new global corporatist system which guarantees that idiocies like Covid quarantine camps and desalination plants and windfarms and solar farms become embedded in our utterly flawed democracy.
The Covid white elephants are just the tip of the iceberg. They have far broader lessons for our failed governance.
Paul Collits
14 October 2022
I am sure there are many more, but you gave us plenty to laugh at. Pity about the cost.
Those quarantine centers will be used by governments as concentration camps for the people who spread "misinformation" and disobey future emergency laws. The next Plandemic is just around the corner, after the election season is over.
I wonder if Clive Palmer's dinosaur golf course also counts as a White Elephant? Although he didn't use government money to do it.
I don't know how we can stop governments from wasting money, but it needs to stop.
Perhaps we need to limit their budgets for local councils to rates, rubbish and roads.
States can have education, health, dams, police, public transport, prisons, SES and main roads.
Feds control defense, trade agreements, currency, border control, interstate highways and pensions.
Even with these responsibilities I think many would be better run privately.
Then we can leave the rest to the people who earn their money.
Like Switzerland where every citizen is fully armed, trained and ready to fight in the army while still milking cows for a living.
1 Timothy 2:1-5 and Proverbs 9:10
Pray for our leaders to be humbly wise, that we can live well. This is God's will, and provides fertile conditions for His saving Gospel, Jesus the Messiah, to be made known. Reverential awe of our creator, the LORD God, is the BEGINNING of wisdom.